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The goal of clinical laboratories is to produce accurate information for clinical decision
making in medicine. More than half of the medical decisions made depend on
clinical laboratory tests.

Patient safety represents an important and critical problem for laboratories. They need to
assure that the information they deliver to physicians is accurate, and
therefore safe for clinicians to use. Endogenous compounds can interfere with
laboratory tests, decreasing accuracy and threatening patient safety. Elevated
bilirubin (bilirubinemia) and elevated lipids (lipemia) are common conditions
that cause significant interferences with laboratory results. Clinicians depend
on laboratories to detect these endogenous interferences. Laboratories must have
a means to detect these endogenous interferences, make decisions about reporting
results, and evaluate their impact.

Most clinical pathology books provide only an abbreviated
introduction to the subject, or provide a long list of references, without the
necessary foundation for evaluating their significance. Package inserts
typically provide scant information. This book provides the empirical and
theoretical foundation for these interferences, describes the clinical settings
where they occur, and explains their evaluation and detection, allowing the
laboratory to interpret the available data on interferences and make the
appropriate decision to effectively report test results while protecting patient
safety.